Golden Gate Bridge ironworkers’ duties include creating scaffolding for painters over the bridge, building access to work areas under the bridge, removing rust and corrosion from rivets and large gusset plates, sandblasting, and street-level work such as repairing parts of the toll plaza that get damaged in car crashes.

The ironworkers, also known as “sky cowboys,” maintain and repair all 1.7 miles of the Golden Gate Bridge – that’s 10,000 to 15,000 square feet a month, said Golden Gate supervisor Phillip Chaney. That’s all while being exposed to the elements while working from as high as 746 feet high. “Even when it's warm at the pedestrian level, they're often under the bridge where it's damp, shady, and cold,” Chaney said.

Sure they’re cute and charming and tourists love them, but they leave a big stinky mess. Pier 39 recently celebrated the 27th anniversary since hundreds of sea lions mysteriously moved into K-Dock and decided to become permanent residents. The task of cleaning up the generous amounts of poop they leave on their wooden floats, or towing a dead sea lion out to sea, goes to the pier’s marina maintenance and harbor patrol. The sea lions are so used to the cleaning routine, they hardly move at all during the washdowns from a high-powered seawater pump aboard their patrol boat.

How stinky can the job get? You might want to keep your distance the next couple of months. We’re in herring season, which does to sea lions what bean burritos do to us. Dylan Montana, part of the marina maintenance team, says he can smell the herring three weeks before they’re pooped out onto the Pier 39 docks, and they have to wash them more often until the season is up.

Even more gross, Montana says, is when they have to cut up floats to be thrown away, and they encounter a layer cake of sea lion poop and fur as they do it.

The most unpleasant, and certainly saddest part of the job, is finding sea lion carcasses around the dock. “Just three days ago a very decomposed sea lion body got jammed under one of the piers and it was headless and bloated, said Sheila Chandor, director of marina operations at Pier 39. “It was so bad they had to wear respirators just to be able to tie a rope around it to tow it out.” For such cases, Chandor said the crew keeps a tin of smelling salts to put under their noses when necessary.

On the plus side, the team also participates in sea lion rescues. Chandor recounted a time when they encountered a slew of prematurely born sea lions on the floats, where they’re susceptible to drowning. “One of the babies was rescued and taken by the navy in San Diego to become a ‘navy seal,’ Chandor said. “Yes, they really do train them.”

Here’s a bonus dirty sea lion job: the pier also employs a sea lion herder to walk the human docks and keep any aggressive males from trying to establish new territory. As with the float cleanings, Chandor says the sea lions are totally used to being shooed away and will do so when they hear the jingle of a crewmember’s belt.

Any job that depends on help from maggots and flesh-eating bugs can safely be classified as dirty. That’s a day at the office for Moe Flannery (above), senior collections manager in the ornithology and mammalogy department at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Flannery collects dead marine mammals along 400 miles of local coast and bay shore line – this includes sea lions, seals, and whales – and prepares them for scientific preservation. The data is shared with the National Marine Fishery Service, and helps scientists glean important information about the animals’ migration patterns, habitat threats, and other data to assist conservation. And to accomplish this, those animals’ skulls must be stripped cleanly to the bone. That’s where it gets nasty.

Disclaimer: All marine mammal stranding activities were conducted under authorization by the National Marine Fisheries Service through a Stranding Agreement issued to the California Academy of Sciences and MMPA/ESA Permit No. 932-1905/MA-009526.

Flannery and others like her collect marine mammals that may be decomposing on the beach for weeks, which means that in her words “you do have to put your hands into a body full of warm, writhing maggots.” But where others see maggots, a collections manager sees a lab assistant: the fly larvae actually help with collecting a clean skull because they break down the surrounding muscle. “They don’t bother me because I know they’ve done half the work for me,” Flannery said.

Flannery brings the carcasses back to the lab to strip off the rest of the muscle and then places them in a maceration bucket – that’s a bucket of warm water – to break down the remaining tissue. Younger mammals, whose skulls are more fragile and susceptible to falling apart, get placed into a tank of dermestid beetles (such as the ones above), whose larvae eat off the surrounding muscle. Afterward, “when you open the dermestid beetles tank, you smell like their waste for a couple of hours,” Flannery said.

When she’s not immersing herself in maggots and beetle larvae, Flannery performs marine mammal necropsies to determine how they died – a “big, bloody, smelly, greasy job,” she calls it. Her latest assignment was to be a young female whale, 40 to 60 feet long, that was found dead several weeks earlier in Oakland and towed to Angel Island. When asked for any especially gruesome necropsy stories, she recalled working on a sperm whale at Point Reyes National Seashore, when a giant wave drenched her in the whale’s blood and guts so completely that it flooded her boots and turned her white socks pink.

Disclaimer: All marine mammal stranding activities were conducted under authorization by the National Marine Fisheries Service through a Stranding Agreement issued to the California Academy of Sciences and MMPA/ESA Permit No. 932-1905/MA-009526.

San Francisco archaeologist Edward DeHaro says these things are guaranteed during dig season: There is no such thing as having white socks, and “on the way home I usually get my own seat on BART because no one wants to sit next to me.”

While archaeology is often associated with Egyptian desert and Indiana Jones, it goes on right here in San Francisco at places such as the Presidio, which has a rich, buried history of its own that goes back thousands of years to Ohlone natives. DeHaro, heritage technician with the Presidio Trust, spends April through September using his trusty trowel to carefully dig around the remains of the western portion of the Spanish Presidio, dating to 1815. The rest of the year is spent in the lab, washing, sorting, and analyzing artifacts.

Archaeology is dirty work in the truest sense: it takes patient, careful digging to locate artifacts without damaging them or losing precious contextual information about them. And then there’s the dirt – lots of it, which easily turns to mud in SF’s damp conditions. DeHaro says he’s come to accept that he’ll never be truly clean during dig season, and neither will his shower, which turns into a watery mud bath. He also says his girlfriend won’t let him in the house until after he takes off his shoes and spills out all the dirt inside, and empties all the dirt in his pants.

“At lunch, despite using soap and water to clean up, there are still dirt spots on our sandwich bread,” said. “When we blow our noses, we get dark black/brown boogers for days afterwards. If it is hot enough to sweat through the dust, you end up looking like you’re wearing streaked camouflage makeup.”

San Francsico archaeology is one dirty job that the public is welcome to join. You can either sign up for a tour of a live excavation, or you can be a volunteer archaeologist yourself. Volunteers help screen all the dirt that gets excavated to search for smaller artifacts, and DeHaro (above) promises you can get plenty dirty and muddy doing it.

It’s OK to call the transfer station a garbage dump, because that’s what it is – Mike Rowe once featured the station, near the spot Candlestick Park once stood on, in his “Dirty Jobs” show. While any kind of garbage handling can be considered dirty, a special designation goes to the handful of people with chemistry backgrounds who handle hazardous household waste – which can include asbestos, fertilizer, batteries, motor oil, paint, and more.

Aside from hauling and sorting all the dirtiest, grossest stuff you can throw at them, the technicians perform some trash mixology as well. Once a week, they take all the junk paint delivered to them and recycle it using a practice called bulking. This practice involves a Tyvek suit, respirator, and a 55 gallon drum. When that sweat-inducing work is done, the recycled paint goes to schools and community groups, and to others who want to paint over graffiti.

Patrick Schlemmer is the curator of invertebrates at the San Francisco Zoo, and he says that for the most part it’s not a dirty job at all – the spiders and bugs are quite clean, in fact. Though there are exceptions, including the dung beetle, which eats exactly what you’d think. “To collect dung beetles for display, I go out into a field and follow cows,” Schlemmer said. “While digging through steaming piles of fresh cow manure, I find plenty of time to question my life choices.”

While some may find them gross, the vast majority of the species Schlemmer handles and works with are harmless -- some, such as bees, tarantulas, and assassin bugs (above), do bite or sting. Though he dreads the inevitable day he gets stung by one of the zoo’s harvester ants. “Their sting," according to expert Justin Schmidt, contains ‘the most toxic known insect venom, more toxic, even, than all snakes, except for a handful of Australian and sea snakes.’ Thankfully, they only deliver a tiny fraction of venom compared to what a snake delivers. Nonetheless, the sting produces an intense pain that can last for up to eight hours.”

Like the California Academy of Sciences’ collections manager, Schlemmer also works with dermestid beetles and collects roadkill such as raccoons and possums so the beetles can eat their flesh and produce clean skeletons. “My wife draws the line at skunks,” he said. “I once brought home a skunk carcass and wanted to store it in our freezer overnight. She made me bury it in the backyard.”

Why surround yourself with bugs when you could be up close with more aesthetically pleasing creatures? Schlemmer, who started off working with mammals and birds, says it’s for the variety: “Most curators have to travel to far-off lands to observe their animals in the wild. I just go outside. In fact, I’ve documented over 100 families of insects right here on zoo grounds.”

The medical field can be dirty work for anyone, but only a select few perform their work on dead patients. Dr. Judy Melinek, a contract pathologist with the Alameda County Sheriff-Coroner's Office and co-author with T.J. Mitchell of the bestselling memoir "Working Stiff," spends about three to four hours of her workday performing autopsies in Oakland. This includes examining bodies lying on stainless-steel tables, removing organs one by one to look for signs of disease or injury, and at the same time, dictating her findings into a microphone to record them for later. All of this is done while wearing head-to-toe protective gear, including specialized N-95 face masks and two layers of gloves. Though she works in the Bay Area now, Melinek got her start in New York in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

While autopsies are often the stuff of TV murder dramas, Melinek says only about 10 percent of the bodies she sees involve homicide. “The most common deaths we see are motor vehicle accidents and accidental drug overdoses, the latter becoming more numerous every year as our regional opioid epidemic continues to worsen,” she said.

When asked about her messiest cases, Melinek stressed that she doesn’t like the word “messy” because it implies disrespect for the dead – though there are challenging situations such as when a body has been found after several days and it’s swollen or has maggots inside. “It is really important to us that we treat the decedent's body — regardless of its condition — in the way we'd want our own loved one to be treated: with respect and dignity,” Melinek said. “The process of death investigation and autopsy is designed to answer questions so that the family has closure and can understand what happened to their loved one.”

Indeed, Melinek spends her work time not just conducting autopsies, but also talking with friends or family members of the dead to answer their questions, and talking to law-enforcement investigators. Other non-autopsy time for Melinek and forensic pathologists like her is spent reviewing medical records and lab reports, looking for clues by examining tissue under a microscope, testifying about her autopsy findings in court.

These are actually two Recology jobs, and the second one happens in Vacaville after it accepts compost from San Francisco and other Bay Area cities. San Francisco claims the largest curbside compost collection program in North America at 650 tons per day – that’s a lot of half-eaten burgers, and it’s more than what the city collects in recycling, Recology spokesman Robert Reed told SFGATE. He adds that by the time the 100 or so SF compost collectors have finished emptying running up and down stairs and emptying the green bins, their yellows shirts have turned black.

All those discarded daily food scraps and yard trimmings are taken to the San Francisco transfer station, run over by a bulldozer operator, and loaded up in one of 14 18-wheel trucks, and hauled to Recology’s outdoor composting station in Vacaville, where an even dirtier process happens: sorting out all that material. Starting at 4 a.m., workers pick through the waste with their hands to sort out tennis shoes, glass, plastic bags, and anything else that the automated sorting system doesn’t catch. Reed, the Recology spokesman, said when you start working in composting, this is inevitably where people have to start.

Yet another dirty job courtesy of Recology, this one belongs to a team of 173 people at a 200,000 square-foot recycling plant at Pier 96. The classifiers, as they’re called, untangle giant hills of trash that San Franciscans leave in blue recycling bins around the city and separate them by glass, plastic, cardboard, and whatever else people decide to toss. The job isn’t easy, but it does attract spectators from around the world: The plant received an $11 million upgrade in late 2016 and is something of a case study for other countries that want to improve their own recycling methods.

A “train wreck” means some very dirty business for Jered Hansen, part of the maintenance crew for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. It means a major piece of equipment (such as the screen above) has broken down within a collection tank at the southeast wastewater treatment plant (the less fancy of the SF facilities), and after gearing up with a full Tyvek suit, mask, and goggles, he has to climb down a ladder 50 feet into raw sewage to repair it. “It absorbs into every piece of clothing,” Hansen said of immersing himself in all that filth during what he jokingly calls a circus act. “It feels like it’s in your skin sometimes.”

What are sewer maintenance workers likely to find in those sewage tanks during their repairs? Rags, condoms, and if they’re lucky, some money. They also have to beware of toxic gases and low oxygen levels. They have monitoring equipment for that, which they must use while trying not to step on any used needles. “You’ve got to take it slow, you can’t rush into it like you’re gonna save the day,” Hansen (above) said.

In addition to the wastewater treatment facility tanks, they have to fix clogged sewage pump stations around the city, which means shoveling out grit while standing in raw sewage. When asked how he handles the smell, Hansen said, “My sense of smell is somehow wrecked. You just develop an immunity.”

When a city’s streets have enough human waste to inspire an interactive poop map, you know there’s something special going on. San Francisco street cleaners have to be on call 24/7 to handle this and everything else that gets left on the street, including blood from crime scenes, large piles of trash, used needles, condoms, urinated-on mattresses, abandoned homeless encampments, and a whole lot of everyday litter. While reaching for that litter, they also need to avoiding being stuck by a hidden needle.

If you spend much time in the city, there’s a good chance you’ve walked by as a Public Workers employee clad in a Tyvek suit and mask uses a steamer to wash poop off a sidewalk. You may also have seen them cleaning graffiti off the walls of businesses, something that can be especially repetitive and frustrating, says Public Workers operations supervisor Mario Montoya, who has been working the streets of SF since before the 1989 earthquake. It hasn’t been all dirty memories on the job, he says: “I remember the good things, like the 49er parades,” he said. “I ran Bay to Breakers, and now I’m working on it after.”

Those 24 large green public toilets spread across the city are maintained seven days a week not by San Francisco, but by the French company JCDecaux as part of an advertising contract with the city. Last year alone, those toilets saw 800,000 flushes, according to JCDecaux spokesman Francois Nion. That creates a lot of dirty work on its own, but Nion says the tougher part is maintaining a respectful relationship with the homeless and other locals who do more than they’re supposed to inside, such as doing drugs or sleeping.

“When someone lost their minds and they messed up inside the toilet, that’s dirty, but that’s also obvious what you have to do,” Nion said. “The more complex part is the social interaction with the set of characters who are more complex. We don’t want to get into fights, we can’t say who can’t go in.”

Nion says his team’s cleaners have gotten some big help from the city’s Pit Stop program, which includes a “potty patrol” to monitor certain toilets in trouble spots like Civic Center and Mission, and make sure they’re not being misused. The Pit Stop program also operates portable toilets in 16 locations around the city (those toilets get cleaned remotely).

The JCDecaux cleaners have morning and afternoon shifts with the same units – obstacles can include toilet cloggings, shopping carts left inside, and jammed doors. And if there’s a major mechanical breakdown, they call in a supervisor.

When 434,000 people use your property every day, it’s going to get messy – although not quite as messy as the old days, when BART trains had carpet floors and seats. The trains get serviced from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the end of their lines, but the dirtier job involves the 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. cleaning shift, at six Bay Area stations (none of which are in San Francisco or Oakland, but in nearby cities).

An overnight staff of six can clean 120 train cars in one shift, having to sweep, mop, and pick up trash thoroughly and quickly – while dealing with a whole lot of chewed gum that’s trampled onto the floor, and graffiti. Oh, and the occasional raw beef that gets abandoned on a seat. To help them zip in between cars, train cleaners – or utility workers as they’re officially called – use a narrow orange vehicle called a tug.

BART featured its own profile of its nighttime train cleaners, in which the employees said they were attracted to the upward mobility in the job and team camaraderie, despite the high (perhaps impossible) demands of keeping such high-use vehicles clean. “We know that the cleanliness of the trains is a very important concern to our customers,” Jeff Baker, BART’s assistant maintenance superintendent for car appearance, said in the profile. “It’s hard work and our crews put an incredible effort into getting it done and done right. As with everyone, we could use more resources, but they do a really good job and we are proud of their work.”

In October, SFGATE gave some much-deserved appreciation to a team shoveling some seriously repugnant gunk that seemingly built up for months out of the escalator grate and into a wheelbarrow at the BART Powell Station.

That’s just part of what station cleaners do, most of it daily. This includes checking their station elevator for human waste or spills every hour on the odd hour, cleaning said waste off elevators and escalators, cleaning the conventional restrooms, picking up trash, and deep-cleaning floors and fare gates at night.

To truly appreciate the moving pieces of San Francisco history that are its cable cars, read the Chronicle’s profile of the nine carpenters who take them apart and put them back together at a shop in Dogpatch. Let’s just say that the job is a little more complicated than assembling a cabinet from IKEA, and it includes perfectly tapering the roof beams, fighting the inevitable rot that comes with water, and wielding a giant power saw – “If this blade went through you, you’d never even feel it,” master carpenter Luis Ferreira said.

Cable cars need to come in for service every 50 years, and it takes six to 18 months getting them ready to hit the hilly streets again.

When she’s not immersing herself in maggots and beetle larvae, Flannery performs marine mammal necropsies to determine how they died – a “big, bloody, smelly, greasy job,” she calls it. Her latest assignment was to be a young female whale, 40 to 60 feet long, that was found dead several weeks earlier in Oakland and towed to Angel Island. When asked for any especially gruesome necropsy stories, she recalled working on a sperm whale at Point Reyes National Seashore, when a giant wave drenched her in the whale’s blood and guts so completely that it flooded her boots and turned her white socks pink.

Disclaimer: All marine mammal stranding activities were conducted under authorization by the National Marine Fisheries Service through a Stranding Agreement issued to the California Academy of Sciences and MMPA/ESA Permit No. 932-1905/MA-009526.

Moe Flannery calls her work a "big bloody, smelly, greasy job," and she takes great pride in it.

All jobs are important in their own way. But here at SFGATE, we thought we'd highlight some of the workers around us who don't get the attention of a pro athlete or musician, but deserve recognition. Take Mario Montoya, who has been keeping the streets of San Francisco clean for almost three decades with SF Public Works. Or the "sky cowboy" ironworkers who repair the Golden Gate Bridge from hundreds of feet above the ocean. Or Flannery, of the California Academy of Sciences, who goes inside dead whales to learn about them and clean them so they can be studied for years later.

Check out our slideshow at the top for more about them and other people performing some of the dirtiest jobs in and around San Francisco. We couldn't mention every single dirty job out there (policemen and firemen deserve their own recognition), but trust us, these gigs get pretty dirty – one person we talked to makes a living stepping down into a tank of raw sewage.

Sea lions have been hanging out at San Francisco's Pier 39 for 27 years... that's a lot of poop that they've left on their floats. Here's what goes into cleaning up after them.

Media: Greg Keraghosian

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Also, watch our video above to learn about the crew at Pier 39 who make it possible for locals and tourists to enjoy its resident sea lions – by washing off the massive amounts of poop they leave behind.